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hey all,

We have problem's with wireless cart here at work (hospital). They keep disconnecting from the network. We have AP's set to 11.b only and so are the external nic card's. Sometime they (wireless card) just stop working. Is there a external card tester or a pcmcia slot tester somewhere that I can buy to test the laptop and the card? Or do you have other suggestions...The laptop's are connected to cart battries for power.

ps: sorry my english is not 100%

I work in a hospital environment - but not in the hospital.  My peers do.

They have to contend with various other Wireless Devices (required by clinical applications - reasons for the season).  They have some stange and varied materials from metal to block, to god knows what, reflective and porous surfaces, various antenna types, and a multitude of other issues:

- Various drivers - mostly resolved by 1 standard now.

- Each floor is divided by a mechanical room - like another floor literally in between the floors.

- Lots of other stuff we had to perform a thorough Spectrum Analysis and Site Survey for - even brought out Cisco's Regional SME's to help out.

Hospitals are challenging and I work in them every day.  There certainly are other environments that are quite challenging as well.

Tekmen, can you give us more detailed information about your situation?  It is really hard to give you important feedback without all of the pertinent details.  Give the make and model of the client adapter and client OS + the make/model of the AP including firmware if you know it.  High-level configs would be great, too.

If you're using 802.11b and not 802.11g in a hospital, you might want to seriously rethink that. If you are stuck using 802.11b, be really careful of your basic rate settings and using multiple SSIDs. If you have a high enough density environment, using multiple SSIDs and have 1 or 2 Mbps as the lowest basic rate you probably have no channel capacity left simply due to management frame poisoning.